The Flyers were supposed to be too young for this. They hardly looked it in a decisive Game 1 win

PITTSBURGH (AP) — So much for the Philadelphia Flyers being too inexperienced for all this. Too young for that matter.

Whatever concerns Philadelphia might have had about its young core evaporated over 60 minutes of confident, assured hockey in a 3-2 victory over Pittsburgh in Game 1 of their first-round series on Saturday night.

Jamie Drysdale, just 24 and one of 10 Flyers players making his postseason debut, spent part of the first period mixing it up with Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, then gave the Flyers the lead midway through the second with a shot that found its way through a perfectly set screen by 20-year-old Denver Barkey.

Porter Martone, 19, provided the game winner late in the third with a wrist shot from the right circle, capping a dazzling sequence in which he hit the brakes and spun around to create a shooting lane in front of Pittsburgh’s Noel Acciari.

“I kind of stopped up and shot it and luckily it went in,” Martone said in typically understated fashion.

Despite playing in just the 10th game of his NHL career, Martone could sense the vibe shift from the regular season to the playoffs. The sea of yellow towel-waving Penguin fans that greeted the Flyers with boos when they came out for pregame warmups offered tangible proof. So did the intensity of the opening period, when the curiosity of the cross-state rivals’ first postseason meeting in eight years quickly gave way to animosity.

Philadelphia stood its ground, often dictating the terms against the Penguins, who have undergone a retooling of their own but still go as the core of Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Erik Karlsson — who came in with a combined 573 career playoff games — go.

Related Stories

Amazon Prime to stream Wednesday NHL games, playoff series in Canada under Rogers deal

2 MIN READ

Patrick Kane rejoins the Chicago Blackhawks, agreeing to a $16 million, 2-year contract

2 MIN READ

Hurricanes to open the NHL season against the Panthers, raise their Stanley Cup banner on Sept. 29

1 MIN READ

While Malkin had a goal and an assist, Crosby was unusually quiet, and Letang and Karlsson were part of a Pittsburgh defense that appeared caught off guard by Philadelphia’s speed.

“The execution wasn’t really what we were hoping for,” Karlsson said. “We didn’t really set out to do what we needed to do on our game plan. We turned too many pucks over in the wrong spot. We made it hard on ourselves.”

Karlsson is confident that first-year coach Dan Muse and the rest of the Penguins coaching staff will have more answers for Monday night’s Game 2.

If Pittsburgh wants its return to the postseason after a three-year absence to be anything more than a cameo, it doesn’t really have a choice.

Muse didn’t think there was anything surprising about the way the Flyers counterattacked. Perhaps the thing that did catch the Penguins off guard was the way Philadelphia’s playoff neophytes hardly seemed intimidated by the stage or the opponent.

Then again, it’s been that way for most of the last two months for the Flyers, who stormed into the postseason behind a scorching finishing stretch fueled by young legs that don’t know any better.

Philadelphia made a not-so-veiled nod to its unlikely rise by arriving for Saturday’s morning skate rocking T-shirts with Hall of Fame goalie Bernie Parent’s facemask on the front, the word “Believe” on the back and “3.8” — the percentage chance it had of making the playoffs at one point this season — on the sleeves.

The Flyers are playing with house money in a sense. They’re one of the longest shots in the 16-team field to end a Stanley Cup drought that’s a half-century old. Not that it matters at the moment. They hardly looked burdened by history in the opener.

No one outside of their dressing room expected them to be here when they were in 13th place in the Eastern Conference coming out of the Milan Cortina Olympic break, a point in time when Martone was finishing up his only season at Michigan State.

Philadelphia coach Rick Tocchet, who was just 20 when he made his first NHL playoff appearance for the Flyers more than four decades ago, knows a thing or two about the challenges that come with playing this time of year.

The pressure ramps up. Players start to grasp their sticks a little more tightly. It can be a lot to handle at any age, let alone a handful of weeks into your career. To that end, he’s tried to keep things light.

“They might be nervous, so we tried to really relax the atmosphere,” Tocchet said.

Philadelphia certainly looked relaxed afterward, but not too relaxed. While Tocchet saw some “hooting and hollering” from the new kids, they were careful not to get ahead of themselves.

And if they might have been tempted to, there are enough old heads among the fresh faces to keep them in check, veterans like forward Sean Couturier. The 33-year-old captain knows how quickly things can change. He is still waiting for a chance to play beyond the second round.

What happened on Saturday night was a good start, but it was also just a start. Holding the NHL’s third-highest-scoring team to 17 shots again, as they did in the series opener, may not be replicable.

The effort and energy the Flyers used to knock the Penguins off-balance, however, is another matter.

Yes, technically Saturday night was the first time nearly half the players in burnt orange, black and white stepped into the crucible of the playoffs. The reality, however, is that Philadelphia’s postseason began a while ago.

“We’ve been playing big games for the last month, month and a half, meaningful games, must-win games,” Couturier said. “We’re put to the test and thought we did a good job of preparing ourselves and being ready.”

___

AP NHL playoffs: https://apnewstodays.pages.dev/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnewstodays.pages.dev/hub/nhl